> >> Discussion has concentrated on front matter, but let's not forget other
> >> things which require an author to CHANGE HIS INPUT according to which
> >> journal is to be used, even if the content is the same.  These are at
> >> least spelling,
>
> agreed.
>
> >> whether to italicise foreign words,
>
> patently untrue: every author in his/her right mind tags such
> words/phrases \foreign {...} (or even \french {...}, \czech {...}, ...)
> and then establishes a suitable definition for the tags to meet the
> criteria of the publication in which it will appear.

Sure every author can tag such things...but this applies equally well to
spelling, italicisation and...

> >> use of punctuation
> >> in abbreviations
>
> again I would disagree: surely one uses \etc, \eg, \ie, etc. with appropriate
> definitions?

...these examples as well.  Indeed, every author could implement his own
front matter markup.  The whole idea is to invent the wheel once.  The
question is, where to draw the line.  The agreement seems to be that
front matter is the most important thing---citations and references can
be handled with BibTeX, natbib and custom-bib, and the other stuff is
relatively trivial.  But why not, as icing on the cake, so to speak,
include in a model .cls commands such as \etc, \colour etc.  One is free
to use only a (possibly empty) subset---no problem.  But if one does
want to use some or all, they are there.  The advantages I see is that
the .cls could be required to recognise these---possibly interpreting
some things (like italicisation) differently in different areas of the
text---and also that one wouldn't have to worry about some .cls defining
\colour to mean something completely different as, for example, a macro
to be interpreted as `color' or `colour' as required.

Since the difficulty of including things like this is small, people who
don't want the stuff can just ignore it with no problem, but it is
helpful to people who would implement in themselves anyway, why NOT
include it?


--
Phillip Helbig                          Email ... [log in to unmask]
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